August 2002 Archive

With yesterday's column, Paul Krugman becomes the first columnist to reach 500 references of a single type. You get one guess of which type of reference that would be.

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Robust political debate is essential to democracy. Our national political discourse is an important part of the democratic process and serves as a critical check on those in power. We are therefore deeply concerned that our public political dialogue, largely expressed through the channels of the mass media, is becoming systematically dominated by sophisticated tactics of manipulation rather than norms of public reason. Despite widespread complaints about spin, no one is adequately documenting the full ramifications of this development to our satisfaction.

Thus, our goal at Spinsanity is to use rigorous, non-partisan analysis to expose the use and intent of the simulated reason and public relations techniques that dominate political discourse, and to document how they are disseminated through the media. By exposing these tactics and demonstrating their pervasiveness, we hope to create a greater awareness of how spin operates and corrupts, and contribute to a healthy and vibrant political discourse.

The first President Bush lost his job because the American public came to think he didn't really care much about doing it. His son is starting to look a lot like a chip off the old 9-iron. If he loses his job for the same reason, that is tough on the Bushes but of no personal concern to the rest of us.

But if the president loses control of his direction of the nation's security and the nation's wealth and the nation's future standing in the world, and if he loses it through what seems like sheer can't-be-botheredness -- well, that would be pretty unforgivable, wouldn't it?

Bush took office at a curiously mixed moment in history. He followed an administration whose war-room approach to governance focused (like a laser, as they used to say) on winning today's evening news and next year's elections. Bush inherited tomorrow: a bubble prosperity built on fraud and greed and stupidity encouraged by eight years of mindless cheerleading for the grand New Economy and a phony peace built on eight years of determined failure (e.g., Iraq, the Middle East "peace process," al Qaeda) to address dangerous realities.

You mentioned your interest in a source of pre-2002 Krugman writings. Try http://www.pkarchive.org/ ("Columns")

The archive appears to contain all of Mr. Krugman's New York Times columns, which began in January 2000. So there will be a little over one year's worth of Clinton administration columns to consider. I'll work to download and evaluate Mr. Krugman's previous columns when I get some time. Mr. Douglass has a generally positive but complex view of Paul Krugman:

Surely it was relatively difficult for economists to criticize Clinton during years of economic growth. Now that things have gone south, whoever is in the White House or Congress is going to take a lot of flak. If you maintain your tallies through future economic (and political) cycles, there might be some interesting comparisons.
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Krugman's book "The Accidental Theorist" is great, especially for someone like me who is interested in grasping the dismal science. I was frankly surprised when his column debuted that he was so polemical and vitriolic. I think it's a shame, really, because it obscures his clever insights. On the other hand, it's nice to have at last some vitriol from the left after many years of the hair-curling editorial pages at the otherwise excellent WSJ.

I generally find New York Times op-ed economist Paul Krugman to be reliable and incisive in his dogged criticism of Bushonomics. But I think he missed the boat today in his comparison of Cisco with Enron. Cisco CEO John Chambers is participating in Bush's wacky Waco shindig, and Krugman strains to suggest that, somehow, Cisco is like Enron. But the only complaint he musters -- aside from noting Chambers' overly handsome compensation, which puts him in the same boat as a gazillion other overpaid CEOs -- is feeble: "The company's specialty was using its own overvalued stock as currency -- paying its employees with stock options, acquiring other companies by issuing more stock." But as Krugman admits, that's entirely legal; it's also plain good business -- when the market boosts your stock through the roof, it's telling you to do something with that value.

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus continues to needle Krugman:

Meanwhile, the world is still waiting for Paul Krugman to correct his Texas Rangers error, which he admits on his Web site, in the same NYT space he first broadcast it in. ...P.S.: Doesn't Gail Collins, as editor of the NYT editorial page, have the power to make Krugman correct his errors in his column? Presumably the NYT has some sort of policy about corrections, and it's not "columnists have no responsibility."

In the past 18 months, Zoellick has been both worse and better than anyone expected. He was part of the atrocious decision to protect the steel lobby, a capitulation to which Bill Clinton never stooped. But he also got global trade talks launched last November and trade promotion authority through its final congressional hurdle last week, a double triumph that the Clintonites can't match. A year ago, indeed, this combination victory was widely said to be impossible: Launching global trade talks would involve U.S. concessions that would alienate Congress, making trade promotion authority impossible. Never mind the naysayers. Zoellick got both.

Mallaby's evaluation of Zoellick and the Bush administration's record is balanced and complex. In contrast, Paul Krugman has mentioned Zoellick only twice this year, each time to predictably bash the administration.

I'm heading out this morning for a business trip, so I may be late with the next two day's entries. I should catch up by Thursday at the latest.

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